A-Infos (en) Anarkismo.net: Magonism and Zapatism

Latin Paradigm of Resistance ---- Unlike the attempts at change that take place 
inside the state, there are those alternatives which are outside the state. It 
is inevitable that we talk in dispute of power, but understanding power as 
political space, and not as the power of the state and as domination. Power does 
not necessarily imply domination. Therefore, it is clear that social movements, 
although generally constituted outside of the state, dispute political space 
with the state and the representatives of representative democracy. The 
movements that have or have had, in history, the objective to provide a change 
of status-quo, and give it a more libertarian direction, certainly disputed 
political space with reaction and with the state.

In the vast majority of cases, to claim something in an organized fashion, 
constituted them a movement.

     Latin America has a great tradition of social movements and, for this 
discussion, I believe it’s relevant to use two of them, both from Mexico in the 
context of the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century, and which 
continue to play a major role in Latin America until our days: Magonism and 
Zapatism. [Português]

Magonism
In 1876 the dictatorship of Porfírio Diaz was initiated; a government 
characterized by the exploitation of the worker and peasant classes, 
concentration of wealth, political power and access to education, basically in 
the families of latifundists and foreign companies, coming principally from 
France, England and the United States. The concentration of land in Mexico was 
absurd, and the ranch owners were “absolute masters of men and things”, with 
immense power and resources. Although the people were living in extreme poverty, 
the dictatorship of Diaz ensured large profits for capitalist investment from 
abroad. Nine million Mexicans were illiterate. According to Pier Francesco Zarcone:

“The two main pillars of the system of rural properties were:

     a) the ‘tiendas de raya’ [stripe stores] – grocery, liquor and poor quality 
clothing stores (the owners of them were the ranch owners themselves), where the 
peasants from a farm were forced to make their purchases, including and 
especially on credit; through this system the farmers – who resold goods of 
little value at higher prices – almost recovered the money allocated for wages 
and indebted peasants could not move from the farms where they worked before 
paying their debts as contracted (this system is still in use in many parts of 
South America);
     b) the ‘ley de fuga’ [law of escape] – which allowed owners to kill the 
fugitive peasant; for the rebel workers a punishment widely used was to bury the 
rebel in a hole in the ground, with their head sticking out, and crush it by 
galloping horses over it.”[1]

With the objective of combating these injustices, was constituted, in the second 
half of the nineteenth century, a libertarian resistance very rich in its 
diversity. Many were examples of associations of mutual aid (Sociedad Particular 
de Socorros Mútuos [Particular Society of Mutual Aid]), militant groups (A 
Social [The Social], Sociedad Agrícola Oriental [East Agricultural Society]), 
strikes organized by workers, libertarian schools (Escuela del Rayo y del 
Socialismo [School of Ray and Socialism]), study groups (Grupo de Estudiantes 
Socialistas [Socialist Students Group]), and the formation of the Congresso 
General Obrero da República Mexicana [General Workers' Congress of the Mexican 
Republic]. We can cite also the very constitution of the Mexican Communist 
Party, which had Bakuninist tendencies. The government began a wave of 
repression, closing the anarchist circles and ending violently with two 
uprisings organized by workers.

Some years later, already in the beginning of the twentieth century, Ricardo 
Flores Magón would be one of the major representatives of libertarian ideals in 
the fight against the Diaz dictatorship. “The apostle of the Mexican social 
revolution” as he was called by Diego A. de Santillán, began his campaign 
against a new Diaz candidature a few years before the turn of the century, and 
little by little he became increasingly oriented towards libertarian socialism. 
In 1900 he founded the journal Regeneración [Regeneration] that soon became one 
of the largest vehicles of the workers press and whose goal was the overthrow of 
the dictatorship and the establishment of libertarian communism, which Magón so 
well learn from the readings of Kropotkin. In Diego Abad de Santillán's description:

     “On August 7, 1900 the first issue of Regeneración appeared in Mexico, 
composed by Ricardo Flores Magón and his older brother, Jesus. The language of 
this journal, which would exert great influence on the fate of the Mexican 
people, led to the surprise of Diaz and the ‘scientists’; one soon saw that 
behind this daring publication was an indomitable will; without any effort the 
anti-Porfírioists of Mexico City were assembling around Ricardo Flores Magón, in 
whom they saw the most conscious brain and most resolute will against the 
tyranny of General Diaz.”[2]

In 1901 Magón also joined the Partido Liberal Mexicano [Mexican Liberal Party] 
(PLM), which had been founded a year earlier. The program of the party had a 
radical liberal direction and the objectives were about the criticism of the 
Catholic political clergy which emerged in defense of the interests of the large 
landowners and capitalist entrepreneurs. Besides, it emphasized the importance 
of claiming the rights of Mexican citizens and the abandonment of the belief 
that the government would be the solution to all ills. It emphasized collective 
action as the main element of democracies.

During the entire period of dictatorship, the PLM and the periodical 
Regeneración – both very influenced by Magón – were major opponents of the 
regime, advocating an end to dictatorship and the Porfirista regime. Moreover, 
by virtue of this libertarian influence present in the party from the second 
half of the 1900s, the PLM radicalized, turning to a more combative discourse 
and creating an internal tension within the party, which repelled the less 
radical elements. It is worth emphasizing that the party did not compete in the 
elections, and served only as a space for horizontal articulation of the 
libertarian revolutionaries of the time, without the objective of taking the 
state and establish a dictatorship, but to put an end to the government of Diaz, 
establishing libertarian communism in its place. In 1906 the PLM launched its 
program and also the Manifesto to the Mexican Nation, a document of great 
importance to the revolutionary movement of the time and which proposed a 
strategy to end the dictatorship of Diaz and the land structures. The PLM turned 
clandestine and organized more than 40 groups of armed resistance throughout 
Mexico and also had indigenous members, known for their struggle for the rights 
of communities and against capitalist property. After radicalization, Francisco 
Madero – a businessman who sympathized with the social reforms and who came, 
still in 1905, to give his blessing to the PLM – established disagreement that 
peaceful means to take Diaz's power would be exhausted.

The electoral fraud of 1910 commanded by Diaz, gave initiative to the explosion 
of the Mexican Revolution. With the arrest of Madero, his opponent in the 
elections, he succeeded to be re-elected again. Exiled in San Antonio, in Texas, 
Madero drew up the Plan of San Luís, calling for an armed uprising on November 
20, in addition to declaring void the elections of 1910, rejecting the election 
of Diaz and instituting himself as provisional president. Many rebels responded 
to the revolutionary call, among them Emiliano Zapata, who played an important 
role in the organization of the indigenous of the Morelos region, and Pancho 
Villa, a former cattle thief and bank robber, very recognized by the humble of 
the regions of Durango and Chihuahua. They were united in an anti-re-electionist 
front, which gave each group a relative degree of autonomy and independence.

Already in 1911, in the midst of revolution and with support from the U.S. IWW 
union, the anarchists, who had Magón at their front, occupied the region of 
Lower California, taking cities of importance such as Mexicali. At the end of 
the month of January, they constituted the “Socialist Republic of Lower 
California”, the first socialist republic in the world. The Magonists also had 
victories in cities like Novo León, Chihuahua, Sonora, Guadalupe and Casas 
Grandes; spaces that would be lost after the repression occasioned by the Madero 
government. Incidentally, we remember that before the rise to power of Madero, 
Magón was invited to become vice president of Mexico, which he refused, in honor 
of his libertarian communist flag.

A large part of the revolutionaries broke with Madero by reason of the amply 
bourgeois constitution of his government and that he did not have any 
aspirations to go beyond liberalism. One of these revolts, organized by Zapata 
in the state of Morelos and the Plan of Ayala launched in November 1911 (and 
that demanded the overthrow of the Madero government and proposed a land reform 
process with control by the peasant communities) formed themselves as tools in 
the struggle of the peasants for the social revolution in the country, always 
inspired by the motto Tierra y Libertad [Land and Freedom]. As the historian 
Alexandre Samis emphasized,

     “the revolutionary cry of Land and Freedom [...] would have been chanted 
first by the anarchist poet and militant Praxedis Guerrero and then disseminated 
by the Magonists. [It was then that] Soto y Gama, a Magonist very close to 
Emiliano Zapata, would come to popularize it within the Zapatista revolutionary 
army.”[3]

Another interesting fact that proves the closeness between Zapata and Magón 
happened when Zapata invited Magón, in 1915, to bring the periodical 
Regeneración to Morelos, putting at his disposal the means that would give the 
journal a national expansion. That ended up not working out owing to reasons of 
health problems and arrests that happened with Magón, and because he believed 
that if the newspaper would remain in the U.S. (as it was at that time), the 
internationalist perspective would be favored.

After that, Mexico sank into a period of civil war and tried to establish a 
Convention, already at the end of 1914. The facts that happened in sequence, 
like the attempt by Villa and Zapata to take Mexico City, the convening of the 
Constituent Assembly by Carranza, who afterwards was elected president and then 
murdered, and the conflicts that followed in the country ended up constituting 
the context of the decadence of the revolutionary period in the country.
Zapatism
Inspired openly in this context of the Mexican Revolution, already at the 
beginning of the 1990s, arose the new Zapatista movement. Unsatisfied with the 
policy of devotion to neo-liberal capitalism adopted by the world, indigenous 
peasants in the south of the country – more specifically the region of Chiapas 
in Mexico – concentrated themselves in the Mexican jungle and began a process of 
discussion and an attempt to unite forces and membership in their struggle 
against neo-liberalism and the consequences of the policies of NAFTA, which was 
scheduled to come into force on the first of January 1994. According to the 
indigenous, the signing of NAFTA would be a death sentence for them, a treaty 
that would further benefit the rich in Mexico by increasing the concentration of 
wealth in the country and prejudicing the poorest. For the same day as the 
beginning of NAFTA this group of Indians, who called themselves the Zapatista 
Army of National Liberation (EZLN), planned an uprising, which ended up taking 
quite a severe form, the whole world over. Its assessment of the Mexican context 
indicated that the EZLN saw the situation in Mexico as a colonial country 
dominated by the USA, and that to be able to make the transition to democracy 
and socialism would require a revolution. Thus the name of the EZLN was chosen.

The EZLN sent, from then on, communications to the whole world, criticizing 
neo-liberal capitalism and accounting the realities of the uprising which 
occurred and the autonomous community that had formed in Chiapas. In this way, 
the story of Chiapas went beyond the borders of Mexico. Even though the EZLN was 
an armed national liberation movement, it did not receive repulse from the 
global population and internationalized itself, being sympathetic to the causes 
of other places in the world.

Even though much of the Mexican population is not fully prepared to join the 
armed struggle, the Zapatista uprising ended up inspiring groups and movements 
around the world. About the fact that it is an armed movement, the EZLN justifies:

     “But for soldiers to no longer be necessary it is needed to turn into a 
soldier and shoot a certain amount of hot lead, writing freedom and justice for 
all, not for some, but for everyone, all of the dead from yesterday and 
tomorrow, the living of today and always, for all those who we call the people 
and homeland, the excluded, those who were born to lose, the nameless, the 
faceless.”[4]

The conception of the EZLN to educate civil society by means of facts has been 
implemented with the divulgence of the political reality of the communities of 
Chiapas, and, in this way, the Zapatista insurgents have become a model for the 
left the whole world over. The tireless struggle against neo-liberal policies 
and for the demilitarization of the autonomous zone that was created, was a 
source of inspiration to all militants who advocated a political struggle by 
means of direct action, with decisions being made in a democratic manner, taking 
into account autonomy and equality between genders. The criticism of 
representative democracy and the collective goals of the Zapatistas can also be 
cited as significant traces of the movement. They say that:

     “the people limit themselves only to elect ‘representatives’ offered to 
them. Their involvement only occurs at the time of the election, to give your 
vote for this or that candidate. For the rest of the time, they are kept as a 
mere spectator of the social scene and one doesn’t make the slightest effort to 
involve them when the matter is to organize the economic and political life of 
the country. [...] In order that it be possible to revert this situation, the 
EZLN becomes a reference and a way for people to cease to be spectators and to 
have an active participation in everyday social life, so that rebellion and 
resistance gain body and mind, in order to realize the hope that things may be 
different than what they are and that the construction of a better world only 
depends on the involvement and participation of every one to eliminate all forms 
of discrimination and exploitation. [The members of the EZLN] do not want to 
have the honor of arriving alone, do not pursue the privilege of sitting in 
higher places, but dedicate themselves tirelessly to ensure that there will be 
everything for everyone.”[5]

After the dissolution of the Zapatista National Liberation Front (FZLN) – civil 
arm of the EZLN and whose goal was to set itself up as a civil and peaceful 
political organization, that would not fight for the seizure of power – in 2005, 
the EZLN launched the Other Campaign. With this, the EZLN intended to devote 
itself to open, civil and peaceful political work, giving room to a new phase of 
Zapatista struggle with views on democracy, freedom and justice. Continuing the 
radical critique of institutional policy and proposing a formal break with the 
Mexican Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) – a supposedly left party of the 
country – which is defended in the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle, 
the EZLN proposed a form of politics which opposes elections and institutional 
means, emphasizing the left and anti-capitalist social movements. For them, in 
this campaign, the focus is to bring their conception as a social movement to 
other regions of Mexico and the world. It is to show that the power of decisions 
and the management of the life of the people should not be given to a government 
or any institutional power that is above them. It is to show that the people 
must organize themselves as a people to handle their own affairs and take the 
political space (in terms of decision-making) that they were robbed of by the 
bureaucracy of governments and institutional political parties.

With the objective of fulfilling the demands created by the establishment of the 
autonomous municipalities, arose the Good Government Juntas which constitutes 
another interesting example of politics made by contemporary social movements. 
The Juntas have an objective to function as a school of direct democracy, giving 
space to and encouraging the public to take decisions in a non-hierarchical 
manner and without corruption: proper self-management or self-government. As the 
Zapatistas said, they “command obeying”, and then, they stimulate discussions 
and collective decision-making. The Juntas were constituted to reorganize the 
old Zapatista autonomous municipalities, taking into account the demands of the 
Zapatistas, the peasants and indigenous Mexicans. Thus, they serve as a bridge 
for the articulation between the diverse Zapatista municipalities, preserving 
the autonomy in relation to the state controlled by Vicente Fox.[*]
A Paradigm of Actual Resistance
I believe it’s important to highlight the “neo-Magonism” in increasing 
development in Mexico. In the same way inspired by the principles raised by the 
Mexican Revolution, and to a great extent by the Zapatistas, the contemporary 
Magonistas are also working for the creation of alternatives to state power, 
stimulating the autonomy to be able to exercise their rights in practice. Thus, 
the Magonistas and Zapatistas of today have established a dialogue that takes 
place in the organizational foundations of left-wing thought, outside the 
institutional framework, which meets the demands of the indigenous issues on a 
revolutionary, non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian basis. Fruit of this 
exchange, the Aliança Magonista Zapatista [Zapatista Magonista Alliance] (AMZ), 
which consists of indigenous groups and militant organizations, surged in 2000, 
declared its fight against the injustices that occur against the poor and 
oppressed people, again bringing to light the slogan “Land and Freedom”, symbol 
of the Magonista-Zapatista cooperation of a not so recent past. Moreover, they 
point out the importance of “another way of doing politics” and of the rejection 
of state power, saying: “we do not aspire to exercise power, but to build a 
free, fair and democratic world.”

For those who hope to trace a paradigm of struggles from the 21st century, which 
has as its objective the ending of exploitation, it is worth knowing that even 
within our Latin America, movements of great importance are taking place, and 
that they have in their midst much more democracy and freedom than all the state 
projects in vogue today. Mexican Magonismo and Zapatismo are just two examples 
of so many mobilizations that, like sectors of the piqueteros in Argentina, 
sectors of the landless and homeless movements in Brazil, the Free Pass 
Movement, among others, question, outside of the state, the status-quo and offer 
a libertarian perspective on transforming the world. The question is whether the 
libertarian socialists of today will accompany these movements, and try to 
influence them as much as is possible, or if they will simply abandon the train 
of history, leaving them only to the tentacles of the state, the alienation of 
capitalism, and the ill-elements that seek every day to use them, clearly in a 
bad way.

June 2006

Notes:
[1] Pier Francisco Zarcone. The Anarchists in the Mexican Revolution. I used 
this great article to lead this text about the Mexican Revolution. Zarcone’s 
article, with a new appendix from the author discussing Zapatismo and Magonismo 
today, was published by Faísca Publications in 2006. The name “stripe stores” 
was used because the larger part of the workers was illiterate and in the 
payment register books, instead of a signature, they used to put a stripe.
[2] Diego Abad de Santillán. Ricardo Flores Magón: the apostle of the Mexican 
revolution. Rio de Janeiro / São Paulo: Achiamé / FARJ/ Faísca, 2006.
[3] Alexandre Samis. “Presentation” In: Ricardo Flores Magón: The Mexican 
Revolution. São Paulo: Imaginário, 2003 p. 19.
[4] Emilio Gennari. Chiapas: Zapatista communities rewrite history. Rio de 
Janeiro: Achiamé, 2002 p. 60.
[5] Ibid. pp. 58; 59; 13.

* This article is an excerpt from Social Mobilizations in Latin America: from 
the nationalization of Bolivian resources to the resistance in Mexico.

* Felipe Correa is a militant from the Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janeiro 
(FARJ).


[*] This article was originally written in 2006, and Vicente Fox is no longer 
state president.

Translated for Anarkismo.net
Related Link: http://www.farj.org
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